Disentangling Continues With Weblog

The kaleidoscope has turned again. Regular readers may remember my push to disentangle from the web. As it turns out, that has worked well, although not quite as I originally planned. Instead of using Kontact for my e-mail and PIM, I'm using Thunderbird for e-mail and Emacs and Org-Mode for PIM. I'm still (primarily) using a graphical desktop, but I'm not very far from working in Emacs all day, reading e-mail in Rmail, storing books as fodt files, and editing them with nxml-mode. Sweet.

I've noticed that my productivity goes way up in times that I am disconnected from the Internet. I wonder if that's true for everyone, or only those who don't deny it.

Today I finished migrating the base of my weblog to a structure using NanoBlogger, bringing the last of my work to my own computer, my own files, my own control. NanoBlogger is excellent. Though some may balk at the fact that it has no comment system built in, and it used to be a reason that kept me from using it, it doesn't bother me now. Instead, I have my comment system set up to route through e-mail. I have set up the templates so that every post (and every page) has links to send comments to the author by e-mail. Transferring comments to the page would be a manual process, but it's very flexible: it permits anonymous comments, signed comments, or even encrypted comments. Eventually, I can envision that these e-mail comments might be processed using ProcMail, to be filtered for spam using SpamAssassin (or whatever), then attached to the correct post and re-uploaded, all automatically. But that will have to be a task on down the road.

For now, I'm very happy that it's an e-mail solution. As part of disentangling from the web, I've been rediscovering the joy of e-mail. As instant messaging and text messaging and microblogging have emerged, my communications channels have gotten out of control. With so many streams to stay on top of, and so much always calling for my time, everything has fallen behind, and e-mail has fallen by the wayside. As part of my disentangling, I've returned my e-mail to my own computer, and made it my primary means of communication again. Now, I can give it the attention it deserves, and I've found that it is actually fun again. I'm still not caught up on the backlog of e-mails I need to reply to, but I'm getting there.

For disentangling from the web, there's still a ways to go, and more work to do, but not much of either. So far, the boost in productivity and clarity and focus have been amazing.